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/srv/www/fsfe.org_git/news/generated_xml/news___2018___news-20181205-01.en.xmlThe FSFE needs you to continue spreading software freedom in Europe!Since 2001 the Free Software Foundation Europe empowers software users to exert control over the technology that is so deeply involved in every aspect of our lives today. As a non-profit organisation, our work is backed by the continuous and generous contributions of our supporters. From public campaigns to policy monitoring, from removing legal barriers to helping organisations in understanding how Free Software contributes to freedom, transparency, and self-determination, our supporters have helped to finance our work.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlSince 2001 the Free Software Foundation Europe empowers software users to exert control over the technology that is so deeply involved in every aspect of our lives today. As a non-profit organisation, our work is backed by the continuous and generous contributions of our supporters. From public campaigns to policy monitoring, from removing legal barriers to helping organisations in understanding how Free Software contributes to freedom, transparency, and self-determination, our supporters have helped to finance our work.

On the European level, 2019 will be a particularly crucial year for software freedom and technological rights that will need your support. The EU Copyright Directive currently moving its way through formal Trilogue discussions threatens to impede the free flow of online information and enact onerous new legal barriers for Free Software developers. The looming elections for the EU Parliament in May will seat politicians with the legislative power to impact the Free Software movement in Europe for the next five years.

To help them get started, we are releasing a comprehensive policy brochure as part of our "Public Money? Public Code!" campaign, which will be used to provide candidates for the EU elections in Spring 2019 with background information about the benefits of Free Software for the public sector. We will also hand over our signatures from individuals and organisations in Europe in our "Public Money? Public Code!" open letter, and continue our movement to demand that code paid for by the people should be freely available to the people.

And of course, in 2019 the FSFE will again use public awareness campaigns and political lobbying, provide our expertise, and produce promotional material and explanatory videos, to bring our community to diverse events in Europe and let them talk about the freedom of software. To achieve our goals, we base our work and form our movement with the help of our community and friends, who ensure that our message gets out and is heard in as many diverse parts of our society as possible.

You can directly help us to master these upcoming challenges in 2019 by becoming a supporter of the FSFE. Any amount that you give will be greatly appreciated. Your contribution makes a huge impact today, tomorrow, and ongoing!

If you would like to know more about the FSFE’s ongoing work, our 2018 yearly report gives you a better and more detailed understanding of the projects that we are presently involved in, which projects we want to realise in 2019, and what we have accomplished over the past year.

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05 Dec 2018 00:00:00 +0100/srv/www/fsfe.org_git/news/generated_xml/news___nl___nl-201811.en.xmlFSFE Newsletter - November 2018For 17 years, the FSFE has been empowering people to have control over their technology, and we get better at it every year. To help you understand how we work and what we do, we have just published "Software freedom in Europe", the yearly report about the FSFE and our activities.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlFor 17 years, the FSFE has been empowering people to have control over their technology, and we get better at it every year. To help you understand how we work and what we do, we have just published "Software freedom in Europe", the yearly report about the FSFE and our activities.

The report gives you a breakdown of important things the FSFE has achieved during the last 12 months in one document. In the 2018 report, you will read about several campaigns, our input on the European Union's copyright reform, and about our successful outreach in demanding publicly financed software be made publicly available under a Free Software licence. You will also get insights about the multiple events we (co-)organised, about our community and groups that helped us with these achievements. Finally, we will display some numbers showing what resources we counted on, and giving an outlook for the next year.

If you like our report, please share it on your favorite (social) media channels and mailing lists, among your colleagues, friends and families.

What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE
A large part of the FSFE team was present at the SFScon in Bolzano, Italy, with a booth. The FSFE's president Matthias Kirschner gave a talk about how "Technology shapes democracy" and our EU public policy programme manager Alexander Sander hosted a policy workshop.
Bits&Bäume is a conference to bring together actors of different sustainability and digital right movements. The FSFE local group Berlin was present with a booth and Erik Albers gave a talk about software as a digital resource, Christian Nähle about Free Software in municipalities and Bernhard Reiter about paying for freedom.
In the third consecutive year, the FSFE coordinators Spain were running a booth at OSHWDem, a fair about Free Software and free hardware. On this occasion, the creation of a FSFE local group in Northern Spain was announced, as well as a translation team for the Galician language. If you are interested to join one of them, please get in contact with Pep Diz.
At this year's Linux Day Italy, the FSFE Local Group Sicilia hosted an event with Giuseppe Bonocore, member of FSFE local group Milano, who gave an introduction about the FSFE and the state of the art of Free Software for "Microservices, dev-ops and silverbullet". At the same time, the FSFE local group Milano was also hosting an event in Milano about Free Software and open source culture, together with local associations where Stefano Costa gave a talk about "Libera il tuo router!" (Free your router).
Paul Boddie writes about how he learned to publish applications through F-Droid and encourages everyone to do likewise: "The process was smooth and people were friendly and happy to help".
Björn Schießle writes about his set-up of Zim, and how that helps him keep being organised.
Diderik van Wingerden proposes an alternative entrepreneurial-based innovation model that he believes has the potential to be good for people and the planet by design.
Get Active

Towards the end of the year, many people are open to join or support a cause they believe in or they believe to do good. If you liked our annual report and the work we are doing, please spread the word about it. You can for example share our report on your favorite (social) media channels and mailing lists, amongst your colleagues, friends and families. If you are not a supporter of the Free Software Foundation Europe yet, please consider doing so and strengthening the European Free Software movement. Help yourself by making the process of understanding or explaining the importance of Free Software easier for yourself with our promotion material. Get our latest merchandise and improve your outfit for the winter season - or gift it to someone you know during the winter celebrations.

Contribute to our newsletter

If you would like to share any thoughts, pictures, or news, send them to us. As always, the address is newsletter@fsfe.org. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

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21 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0100/srv/www/fsfe.org_git/news/generated_xml/news___2018___news-20181105-01.en.xmlAnnual report of the Free Software Foundation Europe 2018"Software freedom in Europe" is the yearly report of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). In one document, it gives you a breakdown of important things the FSFE has done and achieved during the last 12 months. In the 2018 report, you will read about our electoral campaigns, our input on the European Union's copyright reform, and about our successful outreach in demanding publicly financed software be made publicly available under a Free Software licence. You will also get insights about the events we (co-)organised and about our community and groups that helped us with these achievements. Finally, we will display some numbers showing what resources we counted on, and giving an outlook for the next year.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.html"Software freedom in Europe" is the yearly report of the Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE). In one document, it gives you a breakdown of important things the FSFE has done and achieved during the last 12 months. In the 2018 report, you will read about our electoral campaigns, our input on the European Union's copyright reform, and about our successful outreach in demanding publicly financed software be made publicly available under a Free Software licence. You will also get insights about the events we (co-)organised and about our community and groups that helped us with these achievements. Finally, we will display some numbers showing what resources we counted on, and giving an outlook for the next year.About the Free Software Foundation Europe

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) is a charity that empowers people to control technology by enabling access to software and its source code. The rights to use, study, share, and improve this software are essential to guarantee equal participation in democracies of the 21st century.

We work for a world in which everyone has access to the source code of the software that runs in the products we own, or that is essential to the public infrastructure and services of the society we live in. Access to this code should be embedded in a legal environment where people are able to change technologies in a way that fulfills their needs - individually or collectively. Therefore, any software that is used to run public infrastructure or is publicly financed has to be made publicly available.

To shape the future this way, we help people to understand Free Software and its assets today. We would like everyone to understand the four freedoms to use, study, share and improve, and how these freedoms are essential to freedom in our society as a whole.

To help people understand our message, we use public campaigns and political lobbying, we provide expertise in talks and personal meetings, we set up informational booths and organise events, we produce promotion material and explanatory videos. To achieve our goals, we base our work and form our movement with the help of our community and friends, who ensure that our message gets out and is heard in as many diverse parts of our society as possible. We work in a transparent and cooperative way.

Why is software, created using taxpayers' money, not released as Free Software? We started raising this question with our "Public Money? Public Code!" campaign, and received a lot of international attention and support. At the time of writing more than 18.500 individuals and more than 150 organisations signed our open letter demanding that code paid for by the people should be available to the people. As another strong sign that now is the right time to ask for public code, we have found the first public administration to sign our open letter: the City Council of Barcelona.

As our next step, we are releasing a brochure with more than 20 pages to be used in the time before the European Parliament's election in mid-2019. The brochure is directed towards decision makers in politics and administrations: To help them understand Free Software, to explain the benefits of public code for democracy and IT security, and to point out the first steps to positively change procurement and legislation in favor of Free Software. We will not only use this brochure for the European Parliament's election, but also for distribution to decision-makers inside public institutions to help them understand the importance of Free Software in modernising our digital infrastructure. If you would like to support this and other "Public Money? Public Code!"-activities, sign the open letter and help us with your donation.

However, offering expertise to decision-makers is only one factor. It is just as important to apply pressure by raising awareness inside our society and offering people tools to explain the benefits of public code to each other. For the overall campaign's success, it is essential to empower activists and organisations from all over the world to become a part of this movement. One key to achieving this is to offer material and explanations in a person's mother tongue. Thanks to the priceless help of our outstanding volunteers, we have managed to translate the campaign website into 18 languages. The corresponding popular campaign video is dubbed into six different languages (English, French, Italian, German, Portuguese and Russian) and offers subtitles in a total of 15 languages. This way, we enable more than 1.5 billion people to learn about "Public Money, Public Code" in their language.

One of the most controversial policy topics in the European Union 2018 was, and still is, the harmonisation of copyright with a new copyright directive. At the time of writing, and after two years of intense debates, the copyright reform is getting close to the final straight. For the well-being of software freedom, one of the most important debates was around Article 13.

Article 13 of the European Union's current copyright directive proposal can seriously hamper collaborative software development, and especially Free Software, by imposing the use of mandatory upload filters and monitoring of their users. As a result of this proposal, Free Software code-hosting platforms and public code repositories can be arbitrarily removed online.

After a long and intense debate that we accompanied with our Save Code Share campaign, and after collecting more than 14.000 signatories for our open letter to avoid any negative impact for Free Software, we obtained some limited exclusion for Free Software in the text of the European Parliament's directive. With amendment 143 and 150 of the current copyright reform proposal, we now have at least an exclusion for “open source software developing platforms (..) within the meaning of this Directive”. However, the council proposed this exclusion to only be valid for “non-commercial open source software developing platforms”.

MEP Julia Reda receives more than 11.000 signatures against the dangerous impact of Article 13 from the FSFE's policy coordinator Polina Malaja.

Since the beginning of October the European Parliament and the Council have been in the Trialogue in which we keep raising our voices and demanding for an appropriated exception of commercial as well as non-commercial Free Software in the upcoming Copyright Reform package. Most likely, this debate will continue until the beginning of next year, so if you have not yet done so, back our demand and help keep a healthy environment for Free Software development by signing our open letter or helping us finanicially.

The REUSE Initiative

The FSFE aims to support developers by helping them understand the legal implications of reusing a given piece of Free Software, and how to comply with these legal requirements by adding copyright and license information. To achieve this, the FSFE has embarked on our REUSE Initiative, which introduces a set of best practices for license information in ways that not only humans can read, but computers as well, helping to automate licensing. These guidelines have been in place since December 2017, and FSFE is proud to have contributed them under CC-0 licensing terms to the OpenChain Curriculum, a project that helps companies understand best practices supporting their compliance efforts.

In September, the Free University of Bozen-Bolzano published a study that was funded by the FSFE in order for us to better understand the impact of the REUSE Initiative, and how it could be improved upon. Researchers analyzed a set of GitHub projects and the extent to which they respect REUSE guidelines, discovering that compliance is currently lackluster. While this can be attributed to the relatively recent availability of our guidelines, the study also found them overly complex. Accordingly, the next step by the REUSE Initiative to provide support to developers in their efforts to include license information will be to further simplify the guidelines and to provide additional tools for developers, which can include, for example, the so-called “flight rules” developed by IDM-Südtirol. The FSFE is eager to work with partners from industry and research to improve these guidelines in order to see increased compliance in the future, and greatly appreciates all feedback that can help us make this a reality.

At the FSFE, we believe that Free Software and Open Standards should be a topic in all elections, be they on a European, national, regional, or local level. To influence the discourse and the agenda pre-election in favour of Free Software, we run electoral campaigns, where we collect and highlight information about the candidates and political parties who participate, and shed light on how they stand on Free Software. This practice can assist voters who care about Free Software and Open Standards with their voting decisions, by allowing them to understand which candidates support our cause towards a free society. After the elections, we will stay in contact with decision-makers and those who are committed to raising their voices for Free Software.

In 2018, the FSFE ran an Ask Your Candidates campaign in the forefront of the Italian elections by sending a set of questions to the participating political parties and publishing their answers afterwards. These questions aimed to clarify the various parties' positions on the use of Free Software in public administrations, a subject already present in Italian jurisprudence by way of Article 68 and Article 69 of the Code of the Digital Administration.

In conclusion, all parties and candidates that answered the questions - Movimento 5 Stelle, Liberi e Uguali, Partito Democratico and Potere al Popolo - have claimed to be in favour of the adoption and the extended use of Free Software and open formats in public administration as well as in public education. In the running legislation period, the FSFE Italy will use this information to observe the government on whether they are delievering on their promises.

I Love Free Software Day 2018

Every year on February 14th, we celebrate "I Love Free Software Day", a day to say thank you to the contributors of the various Free Software you love: developers, translators, designers, testers, or documentation writers, of huge or smaller software projects. Again, all around the globe the message of 'I love Free Software' (#ilovefs) was spread on mass and social media, in communities and between people.

We counted hundreds of messages on social media, as well as private and corporate blogs. Messages full of love declarations, sweetened with photos and artwork dedicated to the countless people out there contributing to Free Software every day, be it in the form of code, translations, documentation, community work, design, or management of projects. Thank you very much for having shared your love once more!

This year, to monitor the online popularity of the day's celebration, our intern Jan Weymeirsch wrote a scraper in GNU R to scrape trending data from social media and published it as a Free Software tool. We used this scraper to compile results about the quantity of toots and tweets using the hashtag #ilovefs and analysed their corresponding metadata as well. We then used this data to create a word-board that showed which Free Software had been the most popular that users were sharing the love with.

Again, there have just been too many outstanding love declarations by individuals and organisations to be listed here. If you are interested in more details, read this year's report and do not miss #IloveFS-day in 2019!

The FSFE participates in public events to spread the message of Free Software. We are organising more and more successful events on our own, and extending our presence at events organised by others. In 2018 we participated with informative booths and talks at more than 40 events in ten European Countries (Austria, Belgium, Bulgaria, France, Germany, Italy, Netherlands, Serbia, Spain, Sweden).

In July, we combined our annual community meeting with the FSFE's presence at the Libre Software Meeting (aka Rencontres Mondiales du Logiciel Libre) in Strasbourg, France. The Libre Software Meeting is a community-driven Free Software meeting in France, and the FSFE had the chance to run its own freedom-related track during the conference. Our community meeting is the annual event to bring together our community across Europe for a weekend to discuss and set the FSFE's agenda for the months to come.

In April, the FSFE led its annual Free Software Legal and Licensing Workshop (LLW), a 3-day conference in Barcelona, Spain, and a meeting point for world-leading legal experts to remove legal barriers for Free Software adoption, as well as to debate issues and best practices surrounding Free Software licences. In 2018, an estimated 120 legal experts enjoyed an unprecedented amount of parallel tracks and interactive sessions designed to dive into the most contentious topics in the legal world of Free Software.

In January, the FSFE partnered up again with Open Forum Europe for the third edition of the European Free Software Policy Meeting in Brussels, at the heart of European decision-making. The aim of the meeting was to shed light on topics important for Free Software in public policy all over Europe, and to exchange experience for policy action within different regions to help political decision-makers understand how software freedom is related to other freedoms in our society, as well as the economic impact of Free Software. This year, 17 different groups were represented at the European Free Software Policy Meeting, from national Free Software groups to public sector representatives and international organisations.

Booth at the FSFE assembly during 34C3

In the days before New Year's Eve, the FSFE aligned with European Digital Rights (EDRi) and other friends to form a Cluster “Rights & Freedoms” at the 34th Chaos Communication Congress, one of the largest community-driven technology-events in the world. This cluster offered a stage with a full-time programme about digital rights and the FSFE Assembly forms an integral part of this program with our own Free Software track.

If you would like to support our community in participating throughout events in Europe, please consider supporting us financially.

The FSFE Community

In the FSFE's community, we appreciate all the people who help us on different levels with their respective skills on our path towards a society where users are in control of their technology. With this in mind in 2018, some ten thousand people, from Europe and beyond, are supporting the FSFE by spreading our word, signing our open letters about Public Money? Public Code! and Save Code Share, subscribing to our newsletter and mailing lists, and joining our public discussions about Free Software and FSFE.

For those who feel inspired by the FSFE and would like to help keep the FSFE running with their official support, we offer a supporter programme, previously known as the Fellowship programme. The supporter programme includes a financial contribution to the FSFE and is crucial to our success. Joining the supporters program is as easy as any online transaction and it is said to bring good karma!

Last but not least, the FSFE is proud to have highly motivated people around Europe, without whose help the FSFE could not operate in the size and outreach that we have. These volunteers work in the core of our activities and are an integral part of our community. Some of them come together in our European Core Team, others coordinate our country or local groups, and countless volunteers run FSFE booths and give talks. They help spreading our promotional material as well as telling friends, families and colleagues about Free Software in Europe. All of them shape the FSFE community. If you would like to become an integral part of our community read about how you can contribute.

Community members at the FSFE booth during LSM / RMLL 2018.

Code of Conduct and the CARE team

Disagreement and possible conflicts are part of any debate in every community. This is not inherently bad; quite the opposite, in the FSFE's community, we understand differences of opinions to be fundamental in the democratic process, and important to shape the directions of a community-driven organisation like the FSFE. But no matter the dispute at stake, all participants should at all times feel at ease to participate and express their opinion, and to do so without fearing any form of attack, reprisal, or harassment.

It has always been an aim for our community to offer a friendly and peaceful environment for every participant at the FSFE's events and in its infrastructure, online and offline. Since last year, we have officially codified this in our Code of Conduct. To further ensure its availability and enforcement, we created a CARE team at the beginning of this year. Whenever you encounter a situation in which our Code of Conduct was breached, do not hesitate to get in touch with our central CARE team.

Staffers and team

In the beginning of the year, Jonas Öberg left his position as the Executive Director, and later also Polina Malaja, our former Policy Analyst and Legal Coordinator. On the other hand, Max Mehl works full-time for FSFE since January, Francesca Indorato started in February as our new office assistant and, in August, Alexander Sander joined our team as the FSFE's new EU public policy programme manager. At the beginning of October, Galina Mancheva and Gabriel Ku Wei Bin joined us as project managers. In total, the FSFE will employ seven full-time staffers and one part-time employee at the end of 2018. In addition, we constantly have two internship positions in parallel that support our work. Throughout the year, our interns have been: Alexandra Busch, George Brooke-Smith, Jan Weymeirsch and Vincent Lequertier

Formally, the FSFE is an association with charity status, registered in Germany. The charity is governed by its formal members who are responsible for planning, budgeting, setting the agenda, as well as electing and recalling the Executive Council and the Financial Officer. We have seen a growth of members with the general assembly in 2017 and welcome as new members since then: Amandine Cryptie, Polina Malaja, Ulrike Sliwinski, Jan-Christoph Borchardt, Max Mehl, Erik Albers and Florian Snow. Daniel Pocock resigned as a member. Currently, the FSFE e.V. has 28 members.

Daily operations are run by the Executive Council. This year, our long-time financial officer Reinhard Müller stepped down from his position after more than 10 years, and Patrick Ohnewein has been elected to take over the position. Reinhard continues to be a contributor to the FSFE in our technical backend and frontend, in particular as the lead organiser of the FSFE's biggest annual booth at FOSDEM.

In 2018, the General Assembly also approved the removal of the "Fellowship seats". In future, access to membership of the FSFE shall be facilitated through the normal membership procedures for active FSFE contributors. The FSFE believes that encouraging active contributors to become GA members, without the downsides of the elections, is a better way to achieve our mission.

In the last 12 months, we sent out 751 promotion orders around the world. This means literally thousands of stickers, leaflets, and posters have been given out to people, who are interested or are even hearing about Free Software for the first time . If you would like to support us in this direct action, consider supporting us financially or consider a donation along with your personal PR material order. The right leaflet at the right time to the right person can be the start of long-lasting change.

2019 will be another exciting year for software freedom and the Free Software Foundation Europe. On the European level, the FSFE will start the year by further explaining to actors, who are involved in the copyright reform, that Free Software can always be commercial as well as non-commercial, thereby removing barriers for Free Software in Europe. Later in the year, and still before the European Parliament's elections, we will get in contact with the candidates running for office and explain to them the benefits of "Public Money? Public Code!". In parallel, we will raise our voices in the debate about the next European Framework Research Programme, called "Horizon Europe", to ensure that releasing publicly financed software under free licenses becomes an integral part of "Horizon Europe", as well as a general condition for publicly financed science inside the European Union.

On the member states level, there will be elections in many European countries, such as in Switzerland, Albania, Netherlands, Greece, and Spain. We want to accompany as many of them as possible with electoral campaigns to make sure political decision makers understand how Free Software contributes to freedom, transparency, self-determination, as well as economic well-being, and that they vote accordingly in future.

To bring more Free Software to small and medium-sized enterprises and its employees, we are part of FOSS4SMEs. Together with our partners, we are going to create e-learning courses for managers and workers to teach them about the origins and benefits of software freedom. Our goal is that SMEs can make an informed decision and, if SMEs want to use or develop software, that Free Software is their preferred choice. Stay tuned for first releases in 2019!

Preparations are already running for our annual legal conference "Legal Licensing Workshop" (LLW), as well as for our hackathons and annual community meeting. And, besides our own events, we will of course be present again at various Free Software related events, from FOSDEM to the Chaos Communication Camp.

Last but not least, in 2019 the FSFE will again use public awareness campaigns and political lobbying, provide our expertise, and produce promotion material and explanatory videos. To achieve our goals, we base our work and form our movement with the help of our community and friends, who ensure that our message gets out and is heard in as many diverse parts of our society as possible.

On this occasion, we like to send a big thank you to our community: all the contributors, as well as our financial supporters, and donors who made the work of the FSFE possible during the last 12 months.

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05 Nov 2018 00:00:00 +0100/srv/www/fsfe.org_git/news/generated_xml/news___nl___nl-201810.en.xmlFSFE Newsletter - October 2018Historically, Microsoft has used software patents to slow down Free Software adoption in businesses and public administration, by claiming patent infringement of important Free Software components and taking billions of dollars from Free Software re-distributors. In recent years, however, Microsoft approached themselves more and more with the Free Software community. In October, this led to Microsoft's next big step to join the LOT Network and the Open Invention Network (OIN), two organisations that aim to solve problems created by software patents towards the GNU/Linux systems.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlHistorically, Microsoft has used software patents to slow down Free Software adoption in businesses and public administration, by claiming patent infringement of important Free Software components and taking billions of dollars from Free Software re-distributors. In recent years, however, Microsoft approached themselves more and more with the Free Software community. In October, this led to Microsoft's next big step to join the LOT Network and the Open Invention Network (OIN), two organisations that aim to solve problems created by software patents towards the GNU/Linux systems.

LOT works to protect members against so called "non-practicing entities", while the OIN wants to protect a defined set of Free Software technologies from patent litigation, defined in their so-called "Linux system definition".

The FSFE welcomes Microsoft's steps, and encourages them to continue in this direction. The FSFE aligns with our sister organisation, the Free Software Foundation (FSF) in their demand that useful next steps should make a clear, unambiguous statement that Microsoft has ceased all patent infringement claims on the use of Linux in Android: to expand the list of packages protected from patents inside the definition of "Linux System", to include every Free Software component found in a GNU/Linux system, and to use the past patent royalties, extorted from Free Software, to fund the effective abolition of all patents covering ideas in software.

What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE
From December 27th to 30th there will be the 35th Chaos Communication Congress and the FSFE is happy to host an assembly again, acting as an information booth and a meeting point for our friends and all friends of Free Software. For sessions at the FSFE assembly, we are looking for inspiring talks, hands-on workshops, community/developer/strategy meetings or any other public, informative or collaborative activities and have an open call for sessions running until November 18.
On the first weekend of October, the FSFE held it's annual assembly in the Onion Space in Berlin. The general assembly are the members of the FSFE, responsible for strategic planning and budgeting. Besides the members, this year's general assembly welcomed our newest staffer Alexander Sander to attend as guest. Soon after this newsletter reaches you, a more detailed report, including the official minutes, will be published on our homepage.
We started onboarding two new staffers: Galia Mancheva and Gabriel Ku Wei Bin have joined as project managers. We are excited to see our team growing organically, and you will soon hear more from Galia's and Gabriel's work in this newsletter.
Prior to the elections in Hessen and Bavaria, the FSFE together with the "Free Knowledge Coalition", published another "Digital-O-Mat". The Digital-O-Mat is one of our elections campaigns and an online tool to help voters to inform themselves on the parties positions about Free Software. Voters can use the Digital-O-Mat to compare their own views about internet related policies with the ones from the participating parties, and, this way, they are able to find their best match. To also help understand the parties positions in a broader context and raise public attention, the FSFE analysed and evaluated their positions in a public statement.
The FSFE's president Matthias Kirschner gave a talk at Kernel Recipes on the importance of Free Software and its role in protecting democracy.
The FSFE's country coordinator Germany Björn Schießle gave a talk at the “Free Software Free Knowledge as a Profession” series of lectures organised and hosted by the dedicated working university group at TU Dresden.
Do not miss: upcoming events with the FSFE

From November 15 to 17, part of the FSFE team will be present at the SFScon in Bolzano, Italy. The FSFE's president Matthias Kirschner will give a talk and our EU public policy programme manager Alexander Sander will host a policy workshop. Also, we will run a booth, where we will present the findings of the REUSE software study - carried out by the University of Bolzano. If you are around, do pass by: we look forward to meeting you.

Get Active

To let as many people as possible know about software freedom and the FSFE's mission, it is beneficial to explain our cause to them in their mother tongue. Our team of translators does an amazing job in making sure that a majority of Europeans can read our pages in their native language. Indeed, many parts of our homepage have been translated in more than 20 European languages. This is a priceless contribution to spreading software freedom and we are grateful to all contributors who helped us in this.

However, every homepage needs an update from time to time and we will refresh several parts of our homepage in the upcoming weeks - on top of our general publications and news, like this newsletter. This means new parts of our page that need translations. If you are a native speaker of any language apart from English and you like translating, please join our translator team now, and help us to modernize our infrastructure by getting our message out. Our translators team is very helpful and looks forward to welcoming new members. You can get in contact with the team via our mailing list or with individual coordinators listed on the translators page.

Open positions at FSFE

We currently have open positions for an internship as well as for a "Bundesfreiwilligendienst". You an find more information about our internships, previous interns and currently open positions on our internships page.

Contribute to our newsletter

If you would like to share any thoughts, pictures, or news, send them to us. As always, the address is newsletter@fsfe.org. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

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25 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0100/srv/www/fsfe.org_git/news/generated_xml/news___2018___news-20181024-01.en.xmlCall for sessions at the FSFE assembly during 35C3In the context of the 35th Chaos Communication Congress happening from December 27th to 30th in Leipzig, the FSFE is happy to host an assembly again, acting as an information booth and a meeting point for our friends and all friends of Free Software. As in previous editions, we offer attention and a stage for self-organised sessions by and for our community, and this is our call for participation.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlIn the context of the 35th Chaos Communication Congress happening from December 27th to 30th in Leipzig, the FSFE is happy to host an assembly again, acting as an information booth and a meeting point for our friends and all friends of Free Software. As in previous editions, we offer attention and a stage for self-organised sessions by and for our community, and this is our call for participation.

For our sessions at the FSFE assembly, we are looking for inspiring talks, hands-on workshops, community/developer/strategy meetings or any other public, informative or collaborative activities. Topics can be anything that is about or related to Free Software. We welcome technical sessions but even more we encourage to give non-technical talks that address philosophical, economical or other aspects of/about Free Software, in particular about growing diverse communities. We also enjoy sessions about related subjects that have a clear connection to Free Software, for example privacy, data protection, sustainability and similar topics. Finally, we welcome all backgrounds – from your private project to global community projects.

Do you have something different in mind? For our friends, it is also possible to have informal meetings, announcements or other activities at our assembly. In this case, get in touch and we will see what we can do.

Formalities

If you are interested in hosting a session at the FSFE assembly, please apply before

Title: name of your session
Description: description of your session
Type: talk / discussion / meeting / workshop …
Tags: put useful tags here
Link: (if there is a helpful link)
Expected number of participants: 20 or less / up to 50 / up to 100 / beyond
About yourself: some words about you/your biography

You will be informed latest on Monday, November 26, if your session is accepted.

Important details
You do not need to be a supporter of the FSFE to host a session. On the contrary, we welcome external guests.
Please, note we do not guarantee you a ticket. If you convince us pretty soon, however, we might be able to offer you a voucher for the pre-sale. Else, please check the CCC-announcements and proceed according to their requirements for the tickets.
If your session is accepted we will happily take care of its proper organisation, advertising and everything else that needs to be done. You are then welcome to simply come and give/host your session.
Related information:
For your inspiration to this call, see our sessions during 34C3, 33C3 and 32C3.
Since the CCC moved to Leipzig, stage details still need to be sorted out, and you will be informed in time.

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24 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0100/srv/www/fsfe.org_git/news/generated_xml/news___2018___news-20181023-02.en.xml
Free Software changing Microsoft's patent strategy
In October Microsoft took a big step concerning its software patents by joining the LOT Network (LOT stands for "License on Transfer") and the Open Invention Network (OIN). This is a clear sign of progress on the long road to handing control of technology to the people, and the FSFE encourages Microsoft to take additional steps in this direction.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlIn October Microsoft took a big step concerning its
software patents by joining the LOT
Network (LOT stands for "License on Transfer") and the Open Invention Network
(OIN). This is a clear sign of progress on the long road to handing
control of technology to the people, and the FSFE encourages Microsoft
to take additional steps in this direction.

The Free Software Foundation Europe (FSFE) works towards a world
where software does what software users want it to do, and believes that
everybody should be able to participate in the development and
distribution of software, if they are interested to do so. Since its
foundation, the FSFE has raised
awareness about the dangers of software patents, which among other
things add legal and financial risks to commercial Free Software
software development. In short, software patents are harming users,
developers, and society at large.

Since the 2000s, Microsoft has used software patents to slow down
Free Software adoption in businesses and public administration by
claiming patent infringement of important Free Software components and
taking billions of dollars from Free Software re-distributors, including
companies selling phones with Android systems.

However, in recent years Microsoft has published non-core software
under Free Software licenses, purchased Github (a platform used a lot
for Free Software development), and communicated more positively about
Free Software. Now, Microsoft joins LOT and the OIN, two organisations
that work to solve the problems created by software patents.

LOT strives to
protect members against so-called "non-practicing entities", which are
companies that operate by extracting money from others through patents
that they hold, despite not developing products or services of their own
based on these patents. Non-practicing entities are not interested in
any cross-licensing of patents.

The OIN works to protect a defined set of Free Software technologies
from patent litigation. More than 2.600 members of the OIN have signed a
non-aggression agreement that covers a defined list of Free Software
packages called the "Linux
system definition". In a nutshell, this means that under the "Linux
system definition" all members of the OIN have a license for the patents
of all the others members. However, any member, including Microsoft, can
withdraw from the OIN agreement within 30 days.

It must be emphasized that joining LOT and the OIN does not
automatically solve the general problem of software patents, nor some
specific patent threats. Indeed, Microsoft has neither dismantled nor
freely licensed its entire patent portfolio, and would therefore still
be able to sue companies and projects not covered by LOT's and the OIN's
agreements.

The FSFE nevertheless welcomes Microsoft's steps, and encourages them
to continue in this direction. We join our sister organisation, the Free
Software Foundation (FSF), in their
statement that Microsoft should:

"make a clear, unambiguous statement that it has ceased all patent
infringement claims on the use of Linux in Android";
"work within the OIN to expand the definition of what it calls the
"Linux System" so that the list of packages protected from patents
actually includes everything found in a GNU/Linux system"; and
"use the past patent royalties extorted from Free Software to fund
the effective abolition of all patents covering ideas in software".

The FSFE will continue to support companies in their efforts to use
and develop more Free Software, and to end the problem of software
patents.

"The change of Microsoft's approach shows how crucial
persistence and patience are on the long road to software freedom. For
decades, thousands of Free Software contributors have explained the
advantages of software freedom to individual users and developers,
companies, and the public sector. Over time, this created more and more
demand for Free Software, a demand which companies wanting to stay
relevant in the future cannot ignore. To achieve the next steps, users
should continue to demand Free Software, and developers should use their
power to demand from potential employees that they show a strong
interest to work with Free Software", says Matthias Kirschner, President
of the FSFE.

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10 Oct 2018 00:00:00 +0100/srv/www/fsfe.org_git/news/generated_xml/news___nl___nl-201809.en.xmlFSFE Newsletter - September 2018On September 12, the European Parliament rejected the mandate to fast-track the controversial legislation intended to reform online copyright. After its previous rejection in July, they voted again on this package – and this time it was adopted. However, with amendment 143 and 150 of the current copyright reform proposal, we now have at least a limited exclusion for “open source software developing platforms (..) within the meaning of this Directive”. (consolidated document)
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlOn September 12, the European Parliament rejected the mandate to fast-track the
controversial legislation intended to reform online copyright. After its previous
rejection in July, they voted again on this package – and this time it was adopted. However, with amendment 143 and 150 of the current copyright reform proposal, we now have at least a limited exclusion for “open source software developing platforms (..) within the meaning of this Directive”. (consolidated document)

This exception is partially a result of our SaveCodeShare Campaign.
Nearly 13.000 individuals have already signed our open letter asking to preserve the ability to share and build
software online, and lots of Free Software supporters raised their voice. Please continue to support this campaign as the debate is not over yet.

In the next step, the European Parliament and the Council are starting the
Trialogue, moderated by the European Commission. This debate will most likely continue until the beginning of next year. We will closely follow this process and will continue to raise our voice for Free Software. If you like to support our work, join us as a supporter.

"Go open today, there's no excuse not to"

Within our Public Money? Public Code! campaign, we run a series of interviews that highlight good examples and use-cases as best practices. This time we conducted an interview with Timo Aarnio, GIS Expert at the National Land Survey of Finland and product owner for Oskari software. Oskari is an award-winning Free Software platform for browsing, sharing and analysing geographic information from distributed data sources. Read about its background, its development practices and a network with over 38 organisations from both the public and private sector.

What else have we done? Inside and Outside the FSFE
The FSFE is now official partner with the German "Bundesfreiwilligendienst", a successor of the former alternative civilian service. A paid volunteer can now work full time in our office and learn about Free Software and our community. We have an open call running for this position. Be our first "Bufdi" or spread the message to people who might be interested.
Until two years ago, the FSFE had successfully defended the user's right of free choice against compulsory routers introduced by Internet service providers in Germany. Recent numbers seem to acknowledge the importance of our activites, as they suggest (DE) that the number of users who exercise their right of free choice have doubled since the law passed in 2016. Due to Tobias Platen's findings however, users now have a “freedom of choice” but they do not have full “software freedom”, because many embedded devices still use proprietary software.
The FSFE is happy to welcome Alexander Sander as our new EU public policy programme manager.
OMEMO is an XMPP extension protocol, which specifies end-to-end encryption for XMPP clients and it is currently the de-facto standard for XMPP encryption. In his blog, Vanitas Vitae discusses its current problems and the foreseeable future of this protocol.
Paul Boddie argues how Free Software advocates could improve understanding the significance of their message by augmenting the four software freedoms with some freedoms or statements of their own.
Isabel Drost-Fromm posts a detailed summary of the keynote by Lorena Jaume-Palasi given at FrOSCon about the intersection of ethics and technology: "Blessed by the algorithm - the computer says no!".
At the 25th anniversary of Debian, Bits from the Basement writes about Freedom, Aretha Franklin and Debian's birthday.
Diderik van Wingerden estimates and calculates how much Free Software projects would profit if people would donate 25% of the price of its equivalent proprietary alternative.
Torsten Grote explains reproducible build processes, and why they matter for Briar.
Max Mehl, FSFE Program Manager, and Albert Dengg, FSFE System Administrator, participated in BalCCon with a talk about "Public Money? Public Code!" and a "Free Your Android" workshop.
FSFE had a booth at NLLGG Software Freedom Day 2018 in Utrecht, The Netherlands, and at FrOSCon in St. Augustin, Germany,
Open positions at FSFE

We currently have open positions for an internship as well as for a "Bundesfreiwilligendienst". Read about internships, previous interns and currently open positions on our internships page

Contribute to our newsletter

If you would like to share any thoughts, pictures, or news, send them to us. As always, the address is newsletter@fsfe.org. We're looking forward to hearing from you!

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19 Sep 2018 00:00:00 +0100/srv/www/fsfe.org_git/news/generated_xml/news___2018___news-20180917-01.en.xml"Go open today, there's no excuse not to" - interview with Timo Aarnio, GIS expert at National Land Survey Finland.Oskari is a Free Software platform for browsing, sharing and analysing geographic information from distributed data sources. Its development is coordinated by the National Land Survey of Finland and is organised through the Oskari network with over 38 organisations from both the public and private sector. Oskari was awarded second prize in the cross-border category of the European Commission's Sharing and Reuse Awards Contest 2017 and is currently going through incubation phase to become an official Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) Project. To shed light on best practices regarding Free Software developed by public funds, we have conducted an interview with Timo Aarnio, GIS Expert at the National Land Survey of Finland’s SDI Services department.
Support FSFE, join the Fellowship: https://fellowship.fsfe.org/login/join.php
Make a one time donation: http://fsfe.org/donate/donate.htmlOskari is a Free Software platform for browsing, sharing and analysing geographic information from distributed data sources. Its development is coordinated by the National Land Survey of Finland and is organised through the Oskari network with over 38 organisations from both the public and private sector. Oskari was awarded second prize in the cross-border category of the European Commission's Sharing and Reuse Awards Contest 2017 and is currently going through incubation phase to become an official Open Source Geospatial Foundation (OSGeo) Project. To shed light on best practices regarding Free Software developed by public funds, we have conducted an interview with Timo Aarnio, GIS Expert at the National Land Survey of Finland’s SDI Services department.

FSFE: Could you briefly explain what “Oskari” is?

Timo Aarnio: Oskari is an open source web map application platform. It can be used to set up services that benefit from or require a map component. Oskari is designed to be used as a part of spatial data infrastructure so that the data is not stored in the Oskari instance but rather fetched from different APIs on-the-fly.

Timo Aarnio works as a GIS Expert at the National Land Survey of Finland’s SDI Services department. With a background in IT Administration, Timo has a lot of experience with open source software especially on the server side. At NLSFI he has been working as a product owner for the Oskari open source software, with a focus on analysis and thematic mapping functions, and as an expert in the INSPIRE implementation with OGC compliant services. Timo’s biggest interests are agile development, user-centered design, and web applications.

What is the main target group for Oskari? Public administrations?

Public administrations are definitely one target group but not the only one. What we would like to see more in the Oskari community is companies offering Oskari related services and training. Most of the public sector organisations do not have the necessary know-how or resources available to set up this kind of a platform product. Companies can obviously benefit by generating revenue, but for others the benefits are wherever a map representation for a dataset can be useful. This is true in a plethora of use cases be it for planning purposes, spatial analysis or just for simply displaying locations of offices with routing integrated, and so on.

What was the initial idea behind creating Oskari?

The idea for Oskari came about when a new geoportal was being planned for Finland. Commercial solutions did not offer enough functionalities to fulfil the needs of the National Land Survey of Finland, so we decided to develop a new software utilising existing open source solutions as much as possible. There was also a desire to try new development methods, like Agile and Scrum.

How did the development of Oskari benefit from existing open source solutions or from collaboration with other projects?

For Oskari we’ve used as many readily available libraries and pieces of software as possible. We use, for example, GeoTools, GeoServer, OpenLayers, PostgreSQL/PostGIS, Redis, just to name a few. Going further, all of our “production line” is based on Free and Open Source Software tools and our production servers also all run Linux. We’ve also been in contact with some similar projects and tried to find ways to collaborate.

All of our “production line” is based on Free and Open Source Software tools and our production servers also all run Linux.

Was there positive feedback from administrations in Finland so far? Do they find new software well fit for their needs?

I think most of the feedback has been positive, but then again I must be biased. If someone doesn’t find the software useful I guess they are not likely to send any feedback, they just move on to the next software. But as Oskari has a lot of organisations using it to fulfil different needs I can safely say that it has been found useful in many cases. Our web page lists multiple public administrations that use Oskari as well as community projects.

In your demo version on demo.oskari.org, you offer a lot of thematic maps and visualised data. Are these based on open data? Where do you get the data from?

The statistical data currently available on demo.oskari.org is open data from Statistics Finland. The data is utilized via an API. Like mentioned before, in typical cases no data is hosted in the Oskari instance itself.

Who are the people or the organisations behind Oskari and how is it financed?

In 2014, the network for Oskari users was established in Finland, today it consists of partners from all over the world, including organisations, individuals and developers. This incudes National Land Survey of Finland, Finnish Transport Agency, The City of Tampere, The Finnish Heritage Agency, Helsinki Region Environmental Services Authority and many more. Most of the financing has so far come from public authorities.

In 2014, the network for Oskari users was established in Finland, today it consists of partners from all over the world, including organisations, individuals and developers.

With our campaign "Public Money? Public Code!" we demand that publicly funded software should be available to the public under a Free and Open Source Software license. What is your opinion on this matter?

It feels to me that it is quite usual in Finland to publish something as Free Software, but I don't have any data to back up that claim. Personally, I strongly believe that all data and software collected and produced by public administrations should be available as Open data / Free and Open Source Software whenever possible. It should simply be the default, always.

That said, I also understand that there are some cases, when it is simply not commendable to release the source code or data for everyone to access, for example for safety reasons.

I strongly believe that all data and software collected and produced by public administrations should be available as Open data / Free and Open Source Software whenever possible. It should simply be the default, always.

What do you think is the major benefit of Oskari being Free Software?

The potential for re-use and further development, increased transparency and code quality to name a few.

How exactly does Free Software help code quality in your opinion?

I think in many ways, but from the top of my head: when a developer knows that her/his code is going to end up on GitHub she/he probably will be a bit more careful already when first writing the code. Our development process includes code reviews and public commenting, that’s another way for improving quality. Bugs are found faster when more people are able to see the code. I suppose this means they are also reported and verified more efficiently.

You took a Second prize in the cross-border category of the European Commission's Sharing and Reuse Awards Contest 2017. Can you already see many examples of Oskari being re-used across Europe? Is there a lot of interest from organisations and institutions?

Outside of Finland we don’t yet have that many cases of re-using Oskari. The national mapping agencies in Moldova and Iceland are the only ones I know of. I suppose the biggest reason for this is that there is no company selling Oskari yet internationally. So all the organisations interested in Oskari have had to use their own resources when trying to re-use the software. In the future this is probably going to change for the better as interest from companies is on the rise.

Oskari software demo, image source: http://oskari.org/

Who are the active members of the community around Oskari? Is it composed of individuals or organisations?

Cooperation around Oskari in Finland is organised through the Oskari network, which coordinates the software development. Over 38 organisations from both public and private sector are members of it. The ones mentioned before are the currently most active contributors, but also the National Land Survey of Iceland, the National Land Survey of Moldova and Statistics Finland.

Is it possible for people outside, who are interested in the project, to contribute and, if so, how?

Of course, the contributions are welcome and guidelines can be found on our website.

Did a lot of individuals contribute so far? Do you see collaboration with different software developers and other professionals as a big benefit of Free Software for Oskari?

Not that many contributions from individuals so far I’m afraid. We’ve received a couple of pull requests, however. Collaboration with developers from similar projects might be very beneficial as the challenges we face are often similar.

Go open today, there's no excuse not to.

Which recommendations would you give to other innovative projects that would like to follow your example?

Go open today, there's no excuse not to. Give the needed support to early adopters and users when documentation is not sufficient. Try and maintain a healthy ratio of developing new features and maintaining old code. If you aim to develop collaboratively or accept outside contributions use a well-defined process for that.

Interviewer: Erik Albers

With our Public Money? Public Code! campaign, the FSFE demands that publicly financed software developed for the public sector shall be made publicly available under a Free and Open Source Software licence. In order to help understand our call and its benefits, we run a series of interviews that highlight good examples and use-cases as best practices. Our interview partners will be policy makers and decision takers, authorities and developers, that in one way or another are already implementing public code.